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Aphra Behn - the true story

 

Aphra Behn was a truly remarkable woman. Scarcely out of her teens she was recruited into King Charles II’s spy service. Her first project was to spy on the Dutch – at the time Britain’s rivals not only in Europe but also in South and North America – in Surinam, a country in the North East of South America. The journey there in the small sailing ships of the time was horrendously dangerous and unhealthy.

 

In Surinam Aphra was shocked by the brutality of the British governor in his treatment of the slaves who did almost all of the physical labour in the region. She fell in love with one of these slaves, Orinooko, a prince amongst his own people but treated worse than an animal by the British. Eventually she was forced to watch as her lover was tortured, parts of his living body being cut off and burned in front of his eyes before he was brutally put to death.

 

Aphra returned to London to report on what she had discovered in Surinam. Her advice was that Surinam was too isolated from Britain’s other colonies to be easily defended or exploited and that the King should offer to exchange it for the Dutch possession of New Amsterdam. The deal would benefit both countries since Surinam was close to other Dutch interests as New Amsterdam was to Britain’s North American territories. Aphra confidently forecast that New Amsterdam would prove a much more valuable possession than Surinam. The deal went through, New Amsterdam’s name was changed to New York (in honour of the King’s brother, James, Duke of York) and Aphra’s prophesy has been triumphantly vindicated, even though Britain lost control of it before it achieved its full potential.

 

Aphra’s next commission was to exercise her talents as a spy much nearer home, in the home territory of the Dutch enemy. For safety she lodged in a nunnery but even so managed to get involved in a tempestuous love affaire with a British exile, William Scot, who was banned from Britain because of his republican views. His father had been executed as a Regicide – one of those who had voted to execute Charles I, the father of Aphra’s King.

 

On her recall from Holland, Aphra was faced with the problem of making a living in ordinary life. She fiercely rejected the normal solution for a woman in her position – marriage. Instead she inveigled her way into the world of the theatre, a totally male-dominated world. It was only a few years since women had been allowed to appear as actresses on the English stage; until then all female parts were played by men or boys. Performing was still not seen as a respectable profession for women, most people regarding actresses as little more than prostitutes. Aphra’s plan was a much bolder one: she wanted to become the world’s first female professional playwright. In this she was remarkably successful in spite of the fact that Restoration plays were notorious for the sexually provocative nature of their plots and the cheerful dependence on double-entendre for most of the humour. She was more prolific and more popular than any of the male dramatists apart from Dryden.

 

Her private life was as scandalous as her plots. She became involved, hopelessly enamoured, with a man-about-town who proved to be a homosexual and ended up in prison on a charge of sodomy.

 

The rumbustious comedies which were her hallmark hid the pain which dominated much of her private life. Firstly, there were the hopelessly unsuitable love affairs – a negro slave, an enemy of her king and a homosexual. Secondly, she faced the desperate effort to keep her head above water financially for playwrights were paid remarkably little for their efforts. They got only the takings from the third night of a play’s run. Aphra actually landed in debtor’s prison at one stage and was only saved by an anonymous friend who paid off her debts. Right to the end of her life, she felt very bitter about the state’s failure to pay her any of the fee promised her for her spying activities.  Thirdly, she suffered increasingly from the crippling  pain of arthritis which eventually made it almost impossible for her to walk.

 

She died at the age of  48, just two months after William and Mary came to the throne of Britain. In a twist that appealed to her dramatist’s sense of the ironic, William was the leader of the Dutch - the people against whom she had spied so vigorously in her early years.